Growing Beyond Earth Maker Contest held by Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in partnership with Kennedy Space Center

(L-R): STEEEM Club - Alex Fumagalli, Nikolas Gianulis, Jack Sulkes, Ben Arnold, Christopher Oeltjen, Su Andy Cheng, and Nicholas Hernandez.

Palmer Trinity School’s STEEEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Environment, Entrepreneurship, and Math) Club is one of five winners of Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden and NASA’s Growing Beyond Earth Maker Contest in the high school category.

A panel of NASA scientists judged the contest and recognized the Palmer Trinity participants Ben Arnold, Su Andy Cheng, John Paul Dodd, Alex Fumagalli, Nikolas Gianulis, Patrick Grattan, Nicholas Hernandez, Tatiana Multach, Christopher Oeltjen, Carlos Penzini, Jack Sulkes, and John Turner-Smith for their winning design of an optimal plant box that could be used to successfully grow “Outredgeous” red romaine lettuce in a microgravity environment.

The STEEEM Club named their project GAIA after the Greek goddess of the Earth and which also stands for Growth Apparatus in Astro-environment. They proposed a four-sided growth system to cultivate plants using aeroponic growing techniques shown to be the most efficient in space based on research conducted by NASA. Their box is designed to yield eight heads of lettuce per week.

Winning entries of the nationwide contest, such as GAIA, will be considered for implementation on the International Space Station and future space crafts.

“We are extremely proud of the hard work this group has done. Their endeavors have been multidisciplinary, requiring researching previous scientific work, planning, design with CAD software, math calculations for dimensional accuracy, work in the maker space, and much more,” stated Joseph Rivera, Computer Science teacher at Palmer Trinity. “This experience affirms the great work that our faculty and staff do to support students. They are taking their learning beyond the classroom to solve real world problems.”

As winners of this phase of the competition, the students will have an opportunity to create a fully functional prototype to share with NASA and Fairchild in the second phase of the challenge.

About Palmer Trinity School:

Palmer Trinity School—a coeducational, Episcopal day school—is dedicated to promoting academic excellence that integrates knowledge, compassion, global citizenship, and social responsibility. Providing a supportive environment, Palmer Trinity School serves students from a broad range of socio-economic, ethnic, and religious backgrounds in grades 6-12. For more information about the school, visit www.palmertrinity.org. To follow Palmer Trinity School on Facebook, click here.